First published in February, 1848, The Communist Manifesto is the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and represented the "complete theoretical and practical party program" of the Communist League assembled in London in November, 1847 (Introduction, p. 22). This document has survived as the "first definitive statement" of Marx' and Engels' system of socialism. The Communist Manifesto addresses itself to the "workingmen of all countries" and is divided into four main sections: Bourgeois and Proletarians, Proletarians and Communists, Socialist and Communist Literature, and Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties.
The Communist Manifesto was originally published in the German language and was translated into French, English, Italian, Polish, and Russian in Marx' time. Prefaces to seven later editions are included with this text and were written by Marx and Engels jointly (or by Engels after the death of Marx in 1883), either to restore the original thought lost in poor translations or to put the work in context for modern readers by reviewing assumptions contained in the original text which had proved politically or historically false in the intervening years.
This section is the heart of The Communist Manifesto, and the first sentence is the key to the entire work: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (p. 57). Whether free or slave, lord or serf, tradesman or apprentice--"oppressor and oppressed"--throughout history there has always been a system of social and/or economic classes which separate mankind into distinct categories. Marx uses the term bourgeois to refer to the capitalists of the time (1840s)--those who contributed to "social production" or were employers of "wage labor" (note, p. 57). The proletarians are the working-class, the majority of society, whose very lives are controlled by their employers.
The feudal system of gui...